Cray
04/12/03 11:29 AM
24.165.241.5
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7 June 3015
Hinterland VII-n
The word coming over the open comm channel was that the Capellan raiders were unauthorized. Their commander, it was said, had heard that the 14th moon of the gas giant Hinterland VII was being mined for platinum group metals and had a whole stockpile due to technical troubles with the jumpship that (normally) visited monthly. It was also said that the Capellan commander had gotten something like a blind eye from higher command by claiming the Free Worlds League was trying to make a new super armor out of the heavier platinum-group metals like iridium and osmium.
It was just sad that corporate security had rounded up most of the Capellan infantry and half of the mechwarriors within 15 minutes of their landing and were already interrogating them. The infantry was clearly not trained for low gravity, space suited combat on icy surfaces. The Capellan mechwarriors appeared equally incompetent at maneuvering their warmachines across the 0.15G iceskating rink of Hinterland VII-n's surface. The mechwarriors started surrendering after an average of a dozen falls; two had died from cracked cockpits. The spacesuited Capellan infantry found the shrapnel from the security team's airbursting mortar shells great incentive to take management's offer to toss their weapons and enter the warm, pressurized mining facilities.
(The Capellans were half right: the regular jumpship was delayed by months - the 300-year old ship's KF drive died had died horribly and expensively, but should be operable in some months - and thus there was a stockpile of some 1500 tons of platinum-group metals at the base. However, all of it was slated for normal industrial applications and a bit of jewelry, not some new armor. Interesting idea, though, using those metals in armor...)
Company Pilot Thomas Rodrick would've been happy for the security personnel below but his opponents were not bothered by Hinterland VII-n's harsh environment, and they heavily out classed his desperate band of improvised fighters. The two Transits that had accompanied the Capellan Union were having a field day at the expense of the Pogos.
Thus far, the 6 Pogos had been whittled to 4 and the survivors were mangled. One Transit ahd suffered enough wing damage that landing on Hinterland VII-n, a moon with a thick atmosphere, would be inadvisable. And, oh, half of its lasers appeared inoperable. Pilot Rodrick felt so much better knowing that the Transit was left with two medium lasers (the same as he) and one 75mm ultra-high velocity class-20 autocannon (unlike his Pogo). The Pogos would've been better used attacking the Capellan Union, but that was beyond their reach on the surface.
"Alright, let's tighten up and go for Bogey One," Fleet Manager Hart said.
Rodrick wished Hart was a Fleet Admiral, not a Fleet Manager. A Fleet Admiral would've had hundreds of fighters at his command. A Fleet Manager was Olson General Product's bureaucratic term for the manager of an installation's vehicle "fleet." Hart managed about four dozen vehicles, including two dozen survey rovers and ten Pogos. Four of the Pogos remained at the mining facility in their passenger configurations because, well, the mine didn't have lasers for them.
A problem with the mostly-civilian Pogo's tracking system reared its head.
Pilot Yuri wanted to know, "Sir, shouldn't we concentrate on Bogey Two, the damaged Transit?"
"Yeah, sir, we might get that one and scare off the other," Pilot Verne.
Fleet Manager Hart replied hotly, "I was talking about the damaged-"
Rodrick broke in. "Folks, our trackers aren't sharing data like military fighters. We've got the Transits labeled differently. Set the damaged Transit to Bogey Two if you don't have it that way already."
Severals "Oops"es and curses filled the squadro's channel as trackers were reset.
"Now tighten up and focus on Bogey Two," Hart repeated. Tension and nervousness were clear in his rising voice. The Transits had killed their velocity from the last pass and were returning toward the Pogos.
The two groups of fighters closed on each other. Rodrick had been tracking the growing x-ray glow of Bogey Two's superheated hydrogen exhaust for some time, letting his stupid targeting system refine its plot. The algorithm behind the computer let it grow increasingly certain of where the target would be in several milliseconds. That was acceptable for lasers, but the retired fighter pilot in Rodrick wanted to keep resetting the computer. If he'd had missiles or cannons, jinking by the enemy would have it tens, perhaps hundreds of meters away from where the projectiles passed. The Transit computers were proper military targeting computers - they wouldn't have such simple-minded targeting algorithms. Speaking of jinking...
At 150 kilometers from the Transits, Rodrick twisted the translational controller, sliding his Pogo sideways, then up, back, forward, and in other random directions. Using the attitude controller to twist the Pogo about would do nothing but throw his aim off - twisting in place (or along the original velocity vector) didn't move the Pogo out of the way of 75mm tungsten darts. Puffs of (mostly) iron vapor off Bogey Two indicated his surviving squadron mates were firing and hitting, but thus far there was no muzzle flash of electrothermal vapors from the Transits' nose. Who were the Cappies aiming for this pass? Their track-while-scan radar meant there was no "lock on" alert from the Pogo's simple-minded electronic warfare suite, and he had no clue what their cameras were looking at-
At 50 kilometers, just as he was firing, Rodrick saw the muzzle flashes from the Transits. Radar picked up the bursts of tungsten darts and traced them out: him. Rodrick goosed the engine for a couple of Gs of acceleration - with five seconds, he could probably clear the autocannon shells, he could. Had they fired their lasers at him, too? 50 kilometers was knifefighting range, so it would've been odd if all 6 lasers had missed. Maybe the Transits were watching their heat. It was so hard and slow to shed heat in space, one big thermos bottle.
Through his little oval-shaped portal, Rodrick saw a flash of light, yellow-orange light and a little white puffball coming right toward him. A radar check showed a cloud of debris where Bogey Two had been...someone must've hit the Transit's magazine. He was going to pass under it, about ten kilometers clear, as much as there was an "under" in space-
Then he was in a metal garbage can and a manic battlemech was beating it with a sledgehammer. After the beating stopped, the sensory overload wasn't done. Red and yellow lights flashed and alarms screamed.
It was just like the academy. Rodrick concentrated on the attitude control stick to damp tumbling in one axis, then another, and finally got the Pogo stable. (Well, the stars were only slowly spinning past his porthole, not whirling.) Then he paid attention to the damage control reports.
The most telling dmage report was through his window. He was in a cloud of billowing white vapor mixed with almost invisible, watery droplets. The main reaction mass tank had been blown wide open and the remaining fifty cubic meters of liquid hydrogen were spilling into space around him. Rodrick's computers informed him the shrapnel or the actual AC/20 burst had ruptured the containment vessel of the Pogo's fusion reactor. The engine section was mostly down to 100 Kelvin - the main tank must've vented around the engine.
Well. The made further battle rather out of the question, unless the surviving Transit decided to shoot up his Pogo's corpse. No, even then, the onboard batteries really couldn't power the lasers. He had days of lifesupport, but the megajoules weren't there to fire the lasers.
"Fleet Manager, my engine's scrap," Rodrick reported on a command-only channel. "Permission to retreat?"
"Granted, glad to see you're alive. Seems like Lindsy also made it out earlier. I think we can get the last one, too." Hart's voice was strained – Rodrick knew Hart and the other two Pogos must've been piling on Gs to kill their velocity for another pass with the Transit.
Some wrist twists on the attitude controlled brought his Pogo about and...yes. There were a couple, three stars racing away from him in the direction the Transit had gone. Rodrick's Pogo was still drifting along the vector from the last pass. Now, the question was, where was that vector aimed in relation to Hinterland VII-n? The Pogo's chemical reaction control system only had a couple hundred meters per second in its tanks.
Hinterland VII-n was big, bright, and glaringly white beside him, a winter wonderland of ice and howling nitrogen-methane winds. It was also, according to the computer, unreachable despite being only a few hundred kilometers away. Big as the moon was, space combat in an era of fusion engines made it all too easy to escape. Rodrick was definitely moving in an extended, elliptical orbit around Hinterland VII. That would get dangerous - the gas giant didn't have rings as glorious as Sol VI, Saturn, but it did have a lot of crap between its moons. Still, he was SO close, in terms of velocity. He could at least make orbit around Hinterland VII-n, couldn't he?
Yes, the computer agreed. He could end up in an elongated elliptical orbit around the moon. It would stretch some 50000 kilometers from the moon and dive to just a few hundred kilometers over the cloud tops.
That wasn't bad, Rodrick decided. With a thorough cluster [naughty] on the ground and 50% of their aerospace complement destroyed, the Capellans were going to leave soon. There were four Pogos in the mine's hangars with perfectly good fusion engines, each with over one hundred and fifty kilometers per second of reaction mass, not like his Pogo's anemic RCS reserve. He had the battery juice to power an emergency beacon for years.
Rodrick flipped open warning-labeled covers and pulled never-to-be-used handles. Explosive bolts popped behind him, sending glittering bits of metallic confetti past his window. The empty service module drifted away from the intact habitat module. Some work with the translation control stick brought the undamaged habitat module clear of the wreckage (and the now nearly invisible cloud of hydrogen), then Rodrick turned over control to the navigational computer. It could use the little RCS jets more efficiently to drop him back into Hinterland VII-n orbit than he could manage. Rodrick was pondering how the company was going to be pissed at him for ditching a fusion engine (they might go after it before him; good thing it had a beacon) when cheers filled the open channels. The remaining Pogo pilots had been sniping the ass of the Transit as it coasted away from them and taken out its engine.
POGO
The Pogo is a lightweight, conical shuttle that can (nominally) be fitted for space combat. It is a cone 14m tall (with landing gear retracted) and 10m in diameter at the base. The bottom 6 meters is little more than hydrogen tankage to hold the Pogo's 7 tons of reaction mass. This section also holds the 100-rated fusion engine and 6 pop-out landing legs. In combat mode, the "nose" lasers are, in fact, mounted in external equipment lockers in this "service module" section and fire along the Pogo's belly.
The forward 8 meters is really made of three subsections. The front two meters is a thick cylinder holding a variety of sensors and part of the Pogo's reaction control system. The next three meters is the cramped, two-seat cockpit (normally flown by one pilot in combat). Though also only three meters long, the increasing diameter of the Pogo makes the passenger section of the Pogo quite a bit roomier than the cockpit. The nose, cockpit, and passenger section collectively make up the "habitat module." The habitat module is separated from the service module by an extra heat shield – the habitat can be ejected from a damaged service module as a 5-ton escape pod.
The Pogo maneuvers like a spheroid in the atmosphere (i.e., it doesn't maneuver). It re-enters stern first, lands vertically, and launches vertically. It can land on any small patch of ground, unlike an aerodyne, but has no utility in ground support missions (aside from cargo delivery, evacuation of the wounded, etc.)
BATTLE HISTORY
The combat version of the Pogo has seen quite a few battles. As a useful lightweight shuttle that can shoot pirates and foreign raiders, it is quite popular with corporate executives and accountants. They can give their far flung facilities both utility shuttles and defenses!
20-ton shuttles with 2 medium lasers hardly amount to “defenses.” Pogos have a horrible record in combat due to substandard pilots and, well, because they stink as fighters. However, larger facilities that can mass 6 or 12 Pogos can often scare off pirate raids, and having aerospace “fighters” around is always good for employee morale.
POGO
20 tons aerospace fighter
3 tons 100 fusion engine
.…Thrust: 7
….Overthrust: 11
….Integrity: 7
0 tons 10 SHS
3 tons cockpit
7 tons fuel
5 tons armor
….Nose: 20
….Sides: 20
….Aft: 20
2 tons medium lasers (or 2 tons of cargo)
VARIANTS
Because the GM 120 fusion engine is much more common than the Pogo's standard 100-rated fusion engine, many Pogo owners sacrifice a ton of the "debris shielding" (armor) or fuel capacity to mount the GM 120. Since the latter is accomplished more easily (telling the ground crew to not top off the tanks), most Pogos with upgraded engines only have 6 tons of fuel.
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/gemsport.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/b/bigmodel.jpg
Pay attention to the picture's caption:
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/bigemini.htm
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.
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